America certainly has a crisis on its hands. It’s called Donald Trump.
But maybe the only way out of the now longest-ever partial government shutdown would be for Trump to exercise what he thinks is his power to declare a national emergency. Let me offer three reasons.
First, it gets the government working again. Federal employees get paid, the national parks get protected, TSA agents stop calling in sick, our food gets inspected and on and on. This hasn’t been all bad because it has given Americans a lesson in the value of their government, but enough is enough.
Second, Trump will be no closer to getting his wall. His declaration will get challenged in the courts faster than his claims about a crisis at the border can be debunked — which is real fast.
Third, this should force Congress to reconsider giving the president such broad and vague powers to declare an emergency. Some legal scholars claim that a president can claim a national emergency for whatever he decides it is. Congress should put up some guard rails, some legal standards for what qualifies as a true crisis.
But speaking of a real crisis, there actually is one at our southern border. While overall illegal crossings are way down, crossings by families are way up. And for the most part they’re not trying to sneak across some unprotected desert but seeking out border patrol agents to claim asylum.
It really is a humanitarian crisis but the logical answer isn’t to blow several billion dollars on a real wall that solves an imaginary problem. Instead, we should be speeding up the process for evaluating asylum claims and doing what we can to encourage or even coerce Central American governments to act more humanely.
Like the shutdown itself, the real humanitarian crisis has a silver lining. Families are fleeing to America because, despite our current president, we are still seen as a safe, free and prosperous country at least compared to what they’ve got back home.
The shutdown and Trump’s insistence on a wall are both senseless and unnecessary. But if it reminds us that our government does important things in service to average Americans and that our country, despite all its faults, is still a place to which people flee as opposed to flee from, maybe it all has some value.
But now that the lessons are learned it’s time to end the shutdown. Let Trump declare his emergency. The government will get back to work for us, the wall won’t be any closer to getting built and a dangerously vague law might get improved.
